Fortunately, based on our experience from successful customer modernization projects to Amazon Web Services (AWS), we have identified patterns, lessons learned, and best practices that facilitate new mainframe-to-AWS initiatives.

There is no one-size-fits-all for mainframe modernization to AWS. Depending on the business and IT strategy, and depending on the mainframe-specific technical constraints, customers select the most suitable pattern for them. If the mainframe is large enough to process multiple workloads, the characteristics can favor different patterns.

Patterns

Popular and successful patterns implemented by AWS customers include:

Short-term migration with automated refactoring

Short-term migration with emulator rehosting

Augmentation with data analytics

Augmentation with new channels

Best Practices

Learning from the experience of past projects, customers, and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners, we have updated our mainframe-to-AWS best practices to incldue: